The Life of the Skies

Starred review from November 5, 2007
In this eloquent book, Rosen—a novelist and editorial director of Nextbook, which promotes Jewish culture and literature—meditates on the fact that technology enables us to preserve wildlife and at the same time contributes to its demise. He laments that no sooner had he discovered bird-watching than he realized that nature has become “a diminished thing,†as Robert Frost put it in his poem “The Oven Bird.†Everywhere he looks—from a Louisiana swamp to the Israeli desert—he finds a paradox: we are attempting to preserve nature at the same time that we are destroying it. Cars, trains and planes, Rosen writes, have enabled us “to find the birds of America for ourselves, even as these inventions have contributed to the fragmentation that endangers†them.
“Birds sing back to us an aspect of ourselves,†Rosen says, harking back to Audubon, and he confesses that this is why he came to bird-watching, making it even more poignant that so many birds are close to disappearing forever.
Rosen's wide-ranging intellect (he is also the author of The Talmud and the Internet
) flits gracefully from nature to history to poetry, and gentle meditations can be spiked with barbs (“ 'Collecting' is the ornithological euphemism for killingâ€). This beautifully written book is an elegy to the human condition at a time when wilderness is becoming a thing of the past. Illus.